AdLit.org is a national multimedia project offering information and resources to the parents and educators of struggling adolescent readers and writers. AdLit.org is an educational initiative of WETA, the flagship public television and radio station in the nation's capital, and is funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and by the Ann B. and Thomas L. Friedman Family Foundation.

Intensive, Individualized Interventions for Struggling Readers

By: U.S. Department of Education

Because the cause of adolescents'
difficulties in reading vary, interventions may focus on any of the critical elements of knowledge and skill required for the comprehension of complex texts, including fundamental
skills such as phonemic awareness,
phonemic decoding, text reading fluency, vocabulary-building strategies, and self-regulated use of reading comprehension strategies.

Some adolescents need more support to increase literacy skills than regular classroom teachers can provide. Students who are unable to meet grade-level standards in literacy often require supplemental, intensive, and individualized reading intervention to improve their skills. Such interventions are most often provided by reading specialists or teachers who have undergone thorough training to help them understand the program or approach they will use and to deepen their understanding of adolescent struggling readers.

The purpose of intensive interventions is to accelerate literacy development so that students are able to make substantial progress toward accomplishing reading tasks appropriate for their current grade level. Placement in interventions is often a two-step process, beginning with an initial screening assessment to identify those students who need extra help. This step should be followed by assessment with diagnostic tests to
provide a profile of literacy strengths and weaknesses.

Because the cause of adolescents'
difficulties in reading may differ from
student to student, interventions may
focus on any of the critical elements of knowledge and skill required for
the comprehension of complex texts.
These elements include: fundamental
skills such as phonemic awareness,
phonemic decoding, and other word
analysis skills that support word
reading accuracy; text reading fluency;
strategies for building vocabulary;
strategies for understanding and
using the specific textual features
that distinguish different genres;
and self-regulated use of reading
comprehension strategies.

Determining
students' skill levels, helping students
learn specific reading strategies, and
providing intensive and individualized
instruction appear to be especially
promising methods for improving the
outcomes of struggling readers. For
example, students who have difficulty
using the skills needed to recognize
words need different intervention than
do students whose primary deficits are
figuring out the meaning of unfamiliar
words or comprehension of extended
prose.

How to Implement Interventions

Supplemental interventions for struggling
readers can offer the learning opportunities
that student need to make substantial
progress toward grade-level standards.
However, because adolescents' reading
needs are varied and complex, schools
should first take steps to understand the
learning needs they must address.

Although classroom teachers can sometimes
pinpoint students' learning needs by
using informal assessment tools or even observation,
a more reliable method for identifying
struggling readers includes use of
an initial screening test or a threshold score
on a required reading test and subsequent
use of a diagnostic reading test that must
be administered, scored, and interpreted
by a specialist.

For some students, formal,
individually administered diagnostic assessments
are needed; for others with less severe needs group-administered, standardized
or criterion-referenced tests can serve
as a starting point for determining an appropriate
intervention.1 Individually or groupadministered
tests provide information that
allows the specialist to perform the in-depth
diagnosis that is often needed to match intervention
approaches to students' needs.

The identification of students' learning
needs should be followed by the selection
of an intervention that provides an explicit
instructional focus targeted to meet those
needs.

Such instruction might include varying
areas of need and rely on teaching different
strategies to meet them. However, the
teaching strategies selected should provide
students with explicit strategies, techniques,
principles, knowledge, or rules that enable
them to solve problems and complete tasks
independently.2

Central to the effective use of an intervention
is working with students to set
goals for improvement, followed by a description
of the strategy to be mastered,
modeling of the strategy verbal, continued
practice and feedback, and generalization
of the strategy to other tasks.3 Providing
students with learning aids can help
them understand the purpose of the lesson,
a rationale for the lesson, the learning
expectations, and how the content to be
taught relates to what they have learned
previously and what they may learn in the
future.4

Examples of these include advance
organizers to prepare them for reading
and activate prior knowledge, graphic
organizers or maps to track ideas during
reading, and graphic displays that encourage
students to make link between what they know and the content about which
they are reading.

Even though explicit strategy instruction
and various forms of structuring effective
strategy instruction show promise, it also
seems clear that many struggling readers
require more intensive efforts than do students
who are performing at or near grade
level.5

The intensiveness of the intervention
should be matched to the needs of students
who struggle — the greater the instructional
need, the more intensive the intervention.
Two methods for increasing the intensity of
instruction are to provide additional instruction
time or to work with students individually
or in small groups.

The most practical
method for increasing instructional intensity
for smaller numbers of struggling readers is
to provide supplemental small group instruction,
usually for extended periods of time or
as a distinct pull-out class. Within these small
groups, teachers can more readily monitor
student progress and help students learn the
particular strategies that will help them attain
grade-level reading skills. All the studies
that informed this recommendation offered
interventions that provided more intensive
instruction for struggling readers through
smaller classes, increased time for learning,
or both.

These strategies can be offered in
small group intervention sessions. Although
not as interventions per se, these strategies
also serve the needs of poorly prepared
readers when adopted for use in contentarea
classrooms.

Potential Roadblocks and Solutions

Some middle and high schools may not
have the specialized personnel, time, and
resources to conduct efficient screening
assessments for students to identify their
reading needs.

Timely and proper screening,
diagnosis, and treatment of the source
of struggling readers' difficulties are central
to the success of an intervention strategy.
Teacher recommendations can be the motivation
for initiating assignment to an intervention,
but it is more likely that students
will be identified through a screening test
or data analysis of reading tests to identify
scores falling below a specific threshold. In
some cases students might have an individualized
education plan that contains information
about previous testing.

For the most seriously disabled readers,
however, it is crucial that the major source
of the students' reading difficulties be
identified so that interventions can be
targeted to the most critical areas. Previous
results from standardized tests can
be used as a baseline to determine which
students are reading below grade level. If
such data are unavailable, regular middle
and high school teachers can administer
group screening tests that will indicate
which students may be having reading
problems. After students with severe reading
difficulties are identified, further testing
is usually needed. This testing should
be administered and interpreted by reading
specialists or special education teachers
with advanced knowledge of reading
difficulties.

Finding the resources to administer and
interpret these various formal and informal
assessments can be a challenge. We
suggest that educators consider reallocating
resources to carry out timely assessments
and avoid far more serious future
costs to the system, such as retentions in
grade, and costs to individual students,
including dropping out of school.

Acquiring appropriate intervention materials,
equipment, and programs; training
teachers in use of the interventions;
and allocating space for instruction of
individuals and small groups also pose
challenges in many schools. But the importance
of addressing and remediating
students' deficits in reading cannot
be underestimated. The resources can
come from programs such as Title I and
other supplemental state and local funding
sources, or professional development
initiatives can be supported by Title II
dollars.

Business partnerships, private
grants, and other parent and community-
based fundraising initiatives may
also help augment existing resources.
Finally, establishing strong administration
and faculty support to make literacy
a schoolwide priority will certainly help
raise awareness about the importance of
supporting these efforts and will garner
greater commitment to make the needed
alterations to schedules and resources.

Many middle and high school content-area
teachers, in areas such as science, math, and
social studies, do not possess the information
or skills needed to teach reading and
do not believe that it is their job to teach
reading strategies.

To compound this problem,
the typical departmental structure of
secondary schools combined with the lack
of regular communication among teachers
across departments can lead to a lack of
coordination across the curricula. Contentarea
teachers should not be responsible
for carrying out intensive interventions for
struggling readers.

However, content-area
teachers can be taught to use strategies designed to make content-area texts more
accessible to all students, including those
who struggle with literacy. Professional development
sessions that provide clear, easy-to-understand information about the extent
of the reading difficulties that students experience
and about the steps that all teachers
can take to address students' problems
emphasize that a school faculty as a whole
has responsibilities for meeting the needs
of all students. Professional development,
which needs to acknowledge the demands
of all content areas, can include the modeling
and reinforcement of effective strategies
to increase students' abilities to comprehend
their textbooks and other resource materials.

Content-area teachers can use teaching
aids and devices that will help struggling
readers better understand and remember
the content they are teaching. For instance,
graphic organizers, organizing themes, and
guided discussions can help students understand
and master the curriculum content. If
schoolwide coordination is achieved through
professional development, common planning
periods, and informal opportunities for
teachers to collaborate and communicate
across the content areas, teachers can more
easily provide mutually reinforcing reading
opportunities to better prepare students to
meet identified standards in all areas. Ideally,
content-area teachers should work with
language arts teachers, literacy specialists,
and other content-area teachers to provide
coherent and consistent instruction that enables
students to succeed in reading across
the curriculum.

Comments and Recommendations

Thank you so much. I've somehow got ideas on how to help our students in school who have difficulties in reading. I wish i could get some materials for this endeavor since we don't have a reading specialist in our school.

Posted by:
Evelyn G. Zaldua
| July 03, 2010 09:40 PM

This article was very helpful to delineate how we can help struggling readers in secondary education. Many instructors feel they don't have time for interventions because students need to move on to the next class in their schedule. Yet differentiation is important if we are going to meet their needs and see real progress.

Posted by:
D Reginato
| November 02, 2011 12:43 AM

This article is truly helpful for someone like me who is doing a research on struggling adolescents in the Philippines.

Posted by:
Frederick S. Perez
| December 07, 2011 08:41 AM

Awesome Article!

Posted by:
Teacher Fever
| June 21, 2015 12:12 AM

(Note: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.)

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